The Biden administration recalled the active-duty troops it deployed to the US-Mexico border just months ago amid an immigrant surge.
The Pentagon sent the troops to the border in May to get ahead of the surge in immigrants attempting to cross the border just before and after the end of Title 42 restrictions.
President Joe Biden attempted to downplay the necessity of those deployments at the time, saying they would simply assist US Customs and Border Protection agents without taking part in front-line work.
The soldiers helped with ground-based detection, monitoring, data entry, and warehouse support to “free up the border agents that need to be on the border”, Biden said at the time.
Roughly 2,300 National Guard troops will remain at the southern border assisting CBP. Those troops are also under federal orders and will be rotated out with new troops as their deployments end.
While border crossings have fallen since Title 42 expired, they are still at an astonishingly high 5,000 immigrants per day.
Southern Border Still in Crisis
Since former President Donald Trump left office, immigrants have flooded over the border nearly unchecked due to the current administration’s lax policies on dealing with their cases.
Before Title 42 expire, ICE mass released immigrants with no way to realistically track them to ensure they showed back up for court dates.
The administration had already been releasing immigrants without court dates under a program known as Alternatives to Detention, which requires them to check in on a mobile app until a court date is assigned.
But they stopped doing even that as the expiration date approached and encounters at the border surged to new record highs.
Even more concerning, agents recorded a shocking number of Chinese immigrants illegally crossing the southern border.
The agency is confounded by the 1,000% increase and the potential national security risk it poses.
